Abstract

Telemedicine has now become an indispensable part of remote healthcare, but secure patient authentication, data privacy, and low-latency communication have become the most significant issues. Traditional biometrics are prone to spoofing and weak in detecting liveness, and a centralized health record storage presents a security and compliance risk in the presence of regulations, like HIPAA and GDPR. More so, current cryptographic healthcare systems are typically characterized by high latency, which limits their applicability in real-time. In this paper, a 6G-ready hybrid security infrastructure will be suggested using thermal fingerprints as a biometric and a dual-layer blockchain-based infrastructure to perform the secure and decentralized authentication of telemedicine. Thermal vascular entropy maps are coded into privacy-preserving cryptographic tokens with the aid of Bio-Chain Fusion Layer (BCFL). The architecture uses the Lightweight BioChain -LBC- at the edge to provide sub-10ms authentication and a Main Security Chain (MSC) to do immutable logging as well as regulatory compliance. The experimental evaluation results show that the proposed framework achieves 97.8% authentication accuracy, a 98.4% spoof detection rate, and an average authentication latency of 7.4 ms, with a throughput of more than 800 transactions per second (TPS). The system shows about a 73% improvement in latency and accuracy, ranging from 5-8%, compared to conventional biometric and single-chain blockchain authentication systems. These findings indicate a great improvement compared to traditional systems, highlighting the usefulness of integrating thermal fingerprint biometrics and dual-layer blockchain to develop secure and scalable methods of telemedicine authentication. The integration of the 6G network slicing and edge AI allows real-time, scalable authentication in telemedicine, which is more resilient to high user concurrency and reduces the risk of data breach, making it suitable to be deployed on a large scale.